De Pablo co-hosted episodes of the Latin-American talk show Control with former Entertainment Tonight host, Carlos Ponce, at the age of 15 before attending Carnegie Mellon University to study music and theatre. After appearing in a number of television roles, she was cast to portray main character Ziva David in the CBS television series NCIS in 2005 and won an ALMA Award for the role in 2011.\n', '

She performed a portion of Tom Waits\' song "Temptation" for a 2008 episode of NCIS. Outside of the series, she has acted as a vocalist for songs in Roberto Pitre\'s Vivo En Vida CD.\n', '

De Pablo was born in Santiago, Chile, to Francisco de Pablo and María Olga Fernández. She has a younger sister, Andrea, and a brother, Francisco, who works as a disc jockey. When de Pablo was 10 years old, her mother, María Olga Fernández, took a job in Miami, Florida, at a Spanish-language television network. There, de Pablo attended Arvida Middle School and New World School of the Arts, where she studied musical theatre. In the fifth grade, she found many people could not pronounce her first name of "María José", so she asked them to call her "Coté", a common Chilean nickname for María José. De Pablo attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she studied music and theater and appeared in several plays, including And the World Goes \'Round, The House of Bernarda Alba, Indiscretions, The Fantasticks, and A Little Night Music. She graduated in 2000 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Musical Theater.\n', '

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